Well Microsoft made a decent move in having NBC use the Silverlight platform to view the footage on the Olympics in a fairly RIA manner. It was also a shrewed move to increase the Silverlight install base at the same time. All good marketing moves. MS certainly is living proof that if you market something hard enough, it’ll become the defacto standard. certainly Reuters are reporting the battle as being on again.

Adobe… WAKE UP! This could have been put to bed a long time ago. This is not about who’s platform is the best. Flash is clearly the best. It’s about who you tell. Perception is 9/10ths of reality. I used to be a Systems Manager a long time ago. I worked on DEC equipment (big servers), who were then bought put by HP and then became Compaq. The servers in question were Alpha servers and the OS was VMS.

VMS was an incredibly powerful OS that never had and to this day never has, been hacked. It has no viruses and it is one of, if not THE fastest OS out there. It’s system language, DCL, was very powerful and incredibly English like. It is highly redundant and basically wipes it’s ass with any other OS on the planet. It was used heavily by the military and Banking sectors who needed the reliability, speed and assured security it offered. I bet very few of you are sitting there right now going “Oh yes, I remember VMS”. There’s a reason for that. DEC chose a stealth marketing strategy, or at least were stupid or arrogant enough to believe that the strength of their OS would sell it self. Well it did sell itself, to the tech. staff who had to use it, but they aren’t the ones who hold the purse strings. I’ll say that again, THEY AREN’T THE ONES WHO HOLD THE PURSE STRINGS! As a result, when HP bought DEC out, they didn’t even know about the jewel of an OS they had inherited and so they didn’t improve support, they, slowly phased it out.

VMS was so good in it’s own right, that Microsoft head hunted VMS system engineers specifically, to help them create a PC OS version of it. You all will know it as Windows NT. However, NT had to suffer from the fact that it ran on PCs and thus didn’t have the raw power or extensive hardware required to recreate VMS properly on a PC. None the less, it is the daddy (or perhaps the grandaddy) of modern day MS server operating systems in a very real way, and still to this day, nothing matches up to VMS. That’s what happens when you believe marketing isn’t that important.

Marketing is probably more important that the bloody software actually working. “Exhibit number one your honor, Microsoft operating systems”. Adobe need to be agressively marketing the Flash platform and not just to the techies who use it, but to the managers and purse holders who will want to recommend the coolest and best solutions in board room and management meetings, without having to know what they are talking about. They’re going to do that anyway so you’d better start playing their game.

And there’s the rub. Many of these people don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and most certainly don’t listen to us, the unwashed techy masses. They just want to wander through their careers, going from power meeting to power meeting, shouting a lot of buzz words and quoting the latest Gartner or Forrester reports. They don’t understand what they’re saying, but they know that their job and their Xmas bonus is being justified if they’re hedging their bets on what ever the web and news are printing and taking credit for pushing the latest big thing.

And how do they know what the “latest big thing” is? They read Media weekly, they watch the news and they surf the web and come across useful articles like the one Reuters just published, and suddenly the fight is on again and Silverlight is just as good a solution as Flash. “In fact it’s better because we are already using MS Windows” I can hear it now, a thousand developers claping their hands to their foreheads in frustration at the blind embrace of marketing over the market advantages of comparative technical information. Who needs to talk to the techies if you have advertising to listen to? I know we can’t easily change that culture, so until it changes, let’s at least join the game.

Adobe, don’t let Flash be the next VMS. Market agressively to the management as well as the developers, to the man in the street as well as the man in the office. Loose lips might cost lives, but tight lips cost entire companies their market share.

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